that Ian looks like a "garden gnome" she admits to the audience (the play contains a great deal of direct to audience monologues) that she was unfaithful. A disillusioned Colin returns to Elaine Ross and accepts the project she offered him. Elaine calls Sydney "The Emerald city of Oz. Everyone comes here along their yellow brick roads looking for the answers to their problems and all they find are the demons within themselves." The play takes many swipes at contemporary occurrences in the entertainment industry, such as Steven Spielberg's purchase of the Australian writer Thomas Keneally's novel, Schindler's Ark, which one character jokes will be made into a film in which the Jews are rescued by space aliens. At one point, Mike sums up the "great Australian novel", Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, as, "Doctor's marriage goes bad, he goes to the goldfields, gets gangrene and dies", to which Kate says, "I don't think your synopsis quite does the book justice." To that, he simply dismisses it as a "downer". Major performances The play was first performed in Australia in 1987 by the Sydney Theatre Company. It was premiered in the United States off-Broadway by the New York Theatre Workshop at the Perry Street Theatre in Greenwich Village in 1988. The cast was as follows: Colin: Daniel Gerroll Elaine: Doris Black Kate: Gates McFadden Mike: Dan Butler Helen: Alice Haining Malcolm: Jerry Manning The other characters do not appear on-stage. Film In 1988, Michael Jenkins directed a film version of the play. Possible inspirations Williamson and Denis Whitburn worked on a Second World War miniseries with the director Chris Thomson titled The Last Bastion, which ran on Network Ten. The running time was 360 minutes. (Academy Home Entertainment released a version that ran only 160 minutes to U.S. home video.) The miniseries was much ballyhooed but was not well rated. Also, Williamson assisted his brother-in-law, Chris Löfvén, on Oz, an Australian rock musical film that retold 1939 film The Wizard of Oz on the streets of Melbourne. The fictional Land of Oz rarely comes up in Australian conversation; the term is used almost exclusively as the nickname for one's own country. The title of the play Emerald City has been used as a frequent nickname for the city of Sydney since the play was first presented. The title has been attributed to Brett Sheehy who was Sydney